The two houses were on the same lot on the north side of Washington between Dove and Lark (U.S. Route 9W) streets in a densely developed urban neighborhood two blocks west of the state capitol, a National Historic Landmark.

[2] The terrain is level, still rising gently towards the west from the Hudson River a mile (1.6 km) to the east, but less steeply than it does downtown.

Across the street is the Italianate Walter Merchant House,[6] with Fuller's Harmanus Bleecker Library on the corner with Dove.

In the rear was a lawn; a flagstone-paved parking area and garage gave egress to the Elk Street side of the property.

Wooden steps with a railing rose from the street to a pair of round fluted Ionic columns on pedestals.

Inside were bookcases running the length of the walls, and prints of Albany street scenes set in the woodwork above the mantelpiece aside a Latin quotation.

Its front door also had an elliptical arch atop, but was trimmed in marble and topped with a triangular pediment.

The National Register nomination dates it to around 1830, identifying the owner as John F. Bacon, then a local lawyer and clerk of the state senate.

[1] However, Herman Loth, who sketched and photographed the property in 1934 for the Historic American Buildings Survey, dates its construction to 1820.

"The characteristics of the interior unquestionably point to the fact that Philip Hooker was responsible for the design of the house if he was not actually the architect," he wrote in his report.

Over the 50 years that they lived in the house, the Woods gradually purchased all the land on the block between Dove, Elk, Lark and Washington, as the city slowly grew around and past it.

A physician and professor at what is today the Albany Medical College, he was from a prominent local family descended from the city's early Dutch settlers.

[1] Shortly before his death in 1924 the second house, at 149½ Washington, was built when Hun's daughter Lydia married Kenneth Reynolds.

[1] Hun's own son, a physician also named Henry, moved into the main house and took over his father's practice the next year.